Feminism: The advocacy of women’s rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes.

The complementary definition of “masculism” is,

Masculism: The advocacy of men’s rights on the ground of equality of the sexes.

Using the above definitions, masculism and feminism can be seen to be like mirror image twins. They are equally egalitarian; men’s rights advocacy and women’s rights advocacy, with neither group advocating the infringement of the rights of the gender that isn’t their main focus.

It is in these senses of the two words, that I am both a feminist and a masculist at heart and in deed.

Most of the human right’s advocacy I do, isn’t gendered at all. (It is that which I enjoy most.) Amongst the minority of my human rights advocacy work that has to be gendered, I feel that I contribute most effectively to the overall cause of gender equality, when I practise in masculism. My feminist advocacy practice isn’t therefore extensive yet.

In everyday life, we can easily see just how much masculists and feminists are ultimately on the same side, the side of equality of the sexes, rather than the supremacy of one sex or the other. We can see this harmonious complementarity in play, by witnessing masculists and feminists having their frequent, amicable, polite, reasonable, and fruitful dialogues, for example when trading good-hearted banter on Twitter.

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It’s like building the Euro tunnel …

Masculism and feminism (as defined above) are just different parts of the same project. They are analogous to the British and French teams that dug the Euro tunnel, starting from different shores, but eventually meeting in the middle, beneath the sea bed.

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Imagine what chaos there might have been, if there had been a single Anglo-French team, instead of two teams doing the digging, in opposite directions. Unless every team member was bilingual, they’d have needed every detail of the project to be explained in two languages. One a dreadful, illogical language that sexualises toddlers as they first learn to talk, because it is a language in which everything (even tables, chairs and cutlery) is gendered, either masculine or feminine! The other English.

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Imagine that this single, joint Anglo-French team, had started digging from only one of the two shores (selected by tossing a coin), leaving absolutely nobody digging from the other shore! I doubt the tunnel would have been open even today, with that arrangement in place.

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It would be even more chaotic if the pursuit of gender equality were to left to a single, artificially merged school of thought, half of whose adherents tried to mansplain everything, the other half of whom could understand nothing until it had been femsplained to them.

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And that is why we need both feminism and masculism in the world today, in order to promote gender equality adequately, digging from both “shores”, so-to-speak.

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The former corporate motto of the now-completed construction project for the channel tunnel,

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Two shores. One English Channel. Two directions. One tunnel.

Deux rives. Une Manche. Deux directions. Un tunnel.

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inspires a new slogan, which expresses perfectly the good-natured co-operation we can see today between masculists and feminists.

I was pleased to learn that Mike Buchanan had published the manifesto of the UK’s new masculist political party.

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I am disappointed to have noticed that it has all gone rather quiet. on the other side of la Manche that separates masculists like Mr Buchanan from feminists like Harriet Harman. Quiet, that is, since Ms Harman mooted her exciting and original idea of forming a feminist political party, in order to put women’s rights onto the political agenda at last. “About time too,” I thought to myself at the time, “after so many decades of neglect.”

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I do hope that Ms Harman’s plan to start a feminist political party hasn’t quietly been shelved. It would lead to an imbalance, if Ms Harman did not stick to her excellent Plan A, now that Justice For Men and Boys has published its excellent, scholarly general election manifesto and announced its Prospective Parliamentary Candidates.

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Footnote for Hegelians

Thesis + antithesis becomes synthesis, eventually. But there is often a nomenclature struggle, even if the resolution is as clumsy as the NASUWT, the merger of NAS (National Association of Schoolmasters) with the UWT (Union of Women Teachers.)

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Footnote for French-speaking people

Your word for a tunnel is “le tunnel”, which you consider to be a masculine inanimate object. The French word for a thing that thrusts into a tunnel, in order to deliver its load to the other end of the tunnel, which the tunnel was created to receive (in English called a locomotive), is “la locomotive”, a feminine inanimate object, in French. How do you frenchsplain that?

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It seems kinky enough to us Anglophones that you French people apparently consider that everything in the entire world has to be gendered in the first place. That is even before we begin to discover how exactly you gender some things, often surprising us, because many of those French decisions about how things are gendered, to your quintessentially French way of thinking, often seems thoroughly counter-intuitive to us, nay perversely unnatural.

There is a multitude of questions to consider and to debate, concerning Mr Ched Evans..

Is the law under which this offender was convicted, just?

Did the judge direct the jury correctly? If so, why did the jury apparently reach a finding of fact that the victim was so drunk as to be incapable of giving informed consent to sexual intercourse, given that evidence of that incapacity to consent seems, at best flimsy, to many who (like myself) came at this story with an open mind?

Was the jury’s verdict perverse? If so, why did the jury reach a perverse verdict?

Given the reluctance of the Court of Appeal to overturn jury verdicts without new evidence, what sort of new evidence does Mr Ched need now to produce, in order to sustain an appeal, and where is he going to get that new evidence from?

Is it virtuous for members of the public to seek to bring moral and economic pressure upon potential employers of a convicted offender, now paroled and looking for work, in order to disrupt the rehabilitation of one particularly offender? If so, why is that virtuous?

Is a convicted offender denying his guilt, after serving his sentence, a relevant consideration, when deciding whether to offer a released convict employment, so that he can rejoin society?

Ought potential employers of this particular convicted offender to give in to public moral and economic pressure, aimed at preventing this offender’s rehabilitiation? How can potential employers be expected not to give in to the mob, if funding offered for a new stadium (for example) is at stake?

How is the victim ever going to sue the alleged perpetrator for damages in a civil action, if mob rule ensures that he remains unemployable?

Why should this particularly complicated case have become the battle field which it has become, of a pitched battle in the gender politics war?

Which of the above questions is it the the gender politics culture warriors hope to settle, by choosing this case for its next pitched battle?

The chances of anybody getting the chance even to read out the above list of questions during a four-minute slot on sound bite radio, say a dumbed-down magazine format like Woman’s Hour, is slim. This case needs an hour-long programme of its own, like Radio 4’s Analysis, because there aren’t just two opposing camps, who give opposite answers to all ten questions. There are ten distinct questions that need debating, not just one.

The said Swedish midwife got sacked, for her conscientious objection to participating in the abortion industry. I have decided to sign a petition about this, not so much because I expect the people who sacked Ellinor to take any notice of any outrage of mine, as that I wanted thus to congratulate this noble martyr to conscience on making the sacrificial stand she did. Far too few are they who nowadays thus place morals above career.

I invite every one of my readers, even those who are unrepentant abortion industry apologists, who don’t care a fig that their foetal fellow-humans are nowadays being killed by the million, to sign here the hopeless petition designed to cheer this career martyr up more than to bring Swedes to their senses. Sweden is clearly in the wrong here.

Please let us all sign Ellinor’s petition, at least to uphold, in Sweden at least, the dwindling right of health professionals, recently lost in the UK, to abstain from the nowadays fashionable, often publicly-funded, killing of our youngest new citizens, presumably because they find euphemistic the entire rhetoric that killing one human, at the whim of another (the soon-to-be deceased’s mum) could possibly amount to the job description of a true health professional. I and the conscientious objectors to abortion, who are being put out of their health professional jobs, cannot see how “dead” equates to “healthy”. Anybody care to explain this to me?

Sweden is the European nation state whose present-day population has undeservedly inherited a great honour, in addition to Sweden’s role in the recent making of the highly entertaining Bridge/Bron/Broen TV export. Unto Sweden a child was once born, christened Raoul Wallenberg, the saint whose best-publicised antics, when Eur0pe was plunged into Nazi chaos that (albeit) murdered fewer humans than has the abortion industry ever since, whose daring escapades provide my own favourite sermon illustration even to this day.

This week I have been confronted with the dearth of alienation awareness and expertise in the UK field of family services. This is not a surprise to me but what has been surprising if not alarming is the emergence of a new type of professional, the lesser spotted professional if you like (it is coming up to the weekend, humour me).

This lesser spotted professional is someone who for the sake of a few hours training could be the alienation aware professional who knows what to do and how to do it. That this person remains ignorant, not only of what they don’t know but what they do know, is both astounding and terrifying to me in equal measure. This week, on wading through yet another case file, I became aware that the case, which has been bouncing back and forth twixt professionals in public and private law, was actually…

Ever since I sowed a seed by giving a talk at the Covert Harassment Conference in Brussels, on Thursday 20th November 2014, I have waited patiently for this seed to sprout, in the form of the conference videos appearing on the internet. I learnt yesterday that my talk is now available online, along with the other speakers’ talks and the following video of the final panel discussion, which is certainly rather lively, and is probably best to watch first, so that you have an understanding of the audience to whom my own talk was addressed earlier in the day, if and when you get around to watching my talk second.

If the embedded video does not appear in your browser in the space above, please click here instead:

The t-shirt I am wearing at first during my own talk is my cherished Mr Strong t-shirt. It is a souvenir of what were my in certain respects my happiest days since 1998, even though I was recovering from a triple coronary artery by-pass graft operation I had received only a few days before a dear loved one gave me this precious gift. It reminded me of former MEP Patsy Sorensen, who had described me as “strong” at the end of a smaller day-long conference in Antwerp, several years earlier. I had not realised that I was strong until Ms Sorensen pointed that out. The t-shirt underneath Mr Strong reads

The Covert Harassment Conference 2014, the first such, is to be held in Brussels, on Thursday 20th November 2014.

I plan to attend this one day event, God willing. I have been asked to make a short presentation myself. There are some fairly well-known other people speaking. Please visit the conference website for details. I don’t think that it will all be just speeches and presentations from dawn to dusk. It is billed as a conference.

If enough people want to come with me, I hope to drive my minibus over to Brussels the afternoon before (Wednesday 19th), and back the morning or afternoon after (Friday 21st). Anybody who wants a lift from London in my minibus, or from places to the west of London that are en route from Cornwall, please email me.